International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 2013 8(1): 41 63. # The Author
The magic of cinema: time as becoming in
Strangers in Good Company
By PAMELA H. GRAVAGNE*
Abstract
This article examines the ability of cinema to alter our perception and
experience of time and ageing by analysing the film, Strangers in Good
Company, as an example of what Gilles Deleuze called a time-image film in
his philosophy of cinema. By looking at the cinematic representation of time
as culturally contingent and open to change, and the boundary between representation and reality as thin, Deleuze’s theorisation of time-image cinema
presents us with a way of understanding time as a kind of magic that can free
us to live and become rather than as a succession of equally metered, linear
moments. The experience of the older women who ‘‘act’’ in this movie confirms Deleuze’s thinking, when their brief filmic reprieve from the exigencies
of chronological and linear time spills over into their ‘‘real’’ lives, allowing
them to move beyond static representations of old age that tie them to deteriorating bodies and negative identities into an open future of becoming.
Keywords: time, becoming, ageing, cinema, film, magic.
* Pamela H. Gravagne, Department of American Studies and Women Studies Program,
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
An earlier version of this paper, entitled ‘‘Images of Life: The Porosity of Representation and
Reality,’’ was presented at the Inaugural Conference of the European Network in Aging
Studies (ENAS), ‘‘Theorizing Age: Challenging the Disciplines’’ conference in October, 2011,
in Maastricht.
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International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
People look curiously at us as we file into the Riviere Rouge for lunch . . . for we
look to them just like seven old women . . . . One day, after three oafish, unshaven men
in checked shirts and muddy boots have been too engrossed in staring even to drink
their beer, Winnie says wryly, ‘‘I wanted to say to them, ‘What are you staring at?
Haven’t you ever seen film stars before?’’’ The three men didn’t know that we were
film stars disguised as old women; they didn’t have the magic power to penetrate our
disguise . . . .
Mary Meigs, In the Company of Strangers
Once in a while, a movie comes along that quietly and effectively
challenges the assumptions of bodily decline, stereotypes of incompetence
and feelings of aversion that mass media images of the old and the ageing
generally convey. Rather that present ageing as a relentless march of
accumulating losses that gradually erodes one’s right to personhood,
dignity, respect and a secure place in society, such a film turns growing
older into ‘‘a ‘work of art’, something to be achieved’’ where ‘‘losses are
turned, reworked, and impression-managed into a variety of gains’’
(Graham 2010: 179). Strangers in Good Company (1991), a Canadian movie
filmed using ordinary old women rather than actors, is one such movie.
By using the magic of cinema to portray older women in an environment
in which ordinary time stops, ‘‘has no gravity, . . . does not pull you from
second to second into the future’’ (Meigs 1991: 45), we as viewers are given
a glimpse of all of life as an open-ended and unpredictable process of
becoming rather than a rising, then falling staircase or curve (Cole 1992).
To make this transformation in the way we apprehend time and
becoming understandable, this analysis of Strangers in Good Company
first urges us to question what we think we know about time, age,
and growing older, unsettling the way we comprehend old bodies and
enjoining us to reconsider the spaces, both abstract and material, we
construct to contain them. By examining how Strangers in Good Company
gives form to an image of time that counters the usual straightforward
narrative of decline, a story that depicts growing older as occurring in a
finite and predictable fashion within an inescapable web of linear and
regular moments, this analysis opens our thinking to discourses that
explore the idea that time itself may neither be pre-existent nor regular but
actually produced by the always unpredictable entwining of life and
matter, past and present, virtual and actual, that constitutes our existence.
It then, through an exploration of the serendipitous fusion of the ‘‘real’’
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The magic of cinema
lives of its characters with their ‘‘fictional’’ lives, shows how life, an ongoing process of becoming, is linked to art, an on-going process of
rendering this becoming intelligible, and ends up not only challenging
‘‘the idea that the purpose of [cinematic] art is imitation’’ (Rodowick 1997:
18) but recasting its purpose as an active and creative manipulation or
restructuring of ‘‘reality.’’ By both asking us to question the nature of time
and offering us an alternative logic or framework in which to understand
it, this examination of Strangers in Good Company can enable us to take ‘‘a
virtual leap into new worlds to come’’ (Grosz 2011: 191), worlds where
time is understood as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon
rather than a sequential and unidimensional structure, and where its
effects are neither uniform nor predictable (Harro-Loit & Koresaar 2010).
Once we grasp the notion that the gap between the cinematic treatment
of time and how time works in the real world may be as thin and
transparent as film itself (Smethurst 2000), the boundaries we construct
between art and life can be redrawn in ways that allow us to revise the
way we think about growing older and to reassess the meanings we give
to the bodily changes that accompany it. With this expanded understanding of time, made manifest in this analysis of the changes that occur
in both the filmic and the real lives of the women who ‘‘act’’ in Strangers in
Good Company, we can begin to build a better future for those we love and
for ourselves as we age and possibly experience for ourselves some of the
magic of cinema.
The Porosity of Representation and Reality
A swirling white mist fills the screen. As it lingers, far longer than most
movies would allow, we strain to see the indistinct figures that quiver and
fade within it, then slowly begin to materialise. Gradually, a group of older
women takes shape, at first made recognisable more from the quality of
their voices than from their form. Laughing as they amble into view along
a dirt road in the wilderness, it seems as if they were just beamed onto a
brand new planet or transported into a Narnia-like realm where it is
possible that magic could still happen. According to Mary Meigs, one of
the group of women and author of In the Company of Strangers (1991),
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a book about the experience of making the movie Strangers in Good
Company (1991), magic abounds.
When seven women aged 65 88, Mary, Alice, Beth, Catherine, Cissy,
Constance and Winnie, are chosen to ‘‘act’’ as themselves and to include
elements of their own lives in a ‘‘semi-documentary’’ (Meigs 1991: 9) that
has neither conventional plot, dialogue nor action, Meigs describes the
result as ‘‘the magnification of every living and growing thing’’ (38),
including themselves. The outline of the story is simple: stranded when
the bus they had rented to find Constance’s childhood summer home
breaks down in the wilderness of Quebec, the women find refuge in an
abandoned farmhouse, and use their store of knowledge, skill, patience
and humour not only to survive but also to reveal themselves to each other
in a way that allows them to become fast friends both on and off the set.
Yet the atmosphere of magic that this story creates is considerably more
complex. What kind of magic are we talking about? And how does it come
about?
Throughout her book, Meigs variously characterises the magic they feel
as a kind of blind faith in their ability to push themselves ‘‘beyond [their]
known limits’’ (Meigs 1991: 25), as an atmosphere ‘‘of downy nonjudgement’’ (34) in which nothing reminds them that they ‘‘are old except direct
comparison with . . . [the film] crew members who are young’’ (77), and as
a place that exists ‘‘out of time and logic . . . a magic space where old
women have room to exist’’ (10) and can become ‘‘how [they] want to be’’
(149). Implicitly or explicitly, all of Meigs’ descriptions portray an
alteration in their perception of time, and hinge on the ways in which
the experience of making this film graces them with a period of time
relatively free from society’s ubiquitous imposition of chronological
comparison. Ironically, this freedom from the constant reminders of
age not only suffuses Strangers in Good Company with the hope and
life precluded by ageism but also restores the women’s ability to alter
their own relationship among past, present and future, giving them the
opportunity to flourish and continue to grow and become off as well as on
the set. In this magical atmosphere, rather than simply being old women
who are acting in a film, they also come to see themselves as ‘‘film stars
[only] disguised as old women’’ (34), and they begin to wonder just where
the line between representation and reality is drawn.
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The magic of cinema
Meigs’ observations about the way this film ‘‘magically’’ modifies how
these seven older women experience and understand themselves in time
address many of the same concerns that Gilles Deleuze deals with in his
philosophy of cinema. In two of his later works, The Movement Image (1983)
and The Time Image (1985), Deleuze seeks to explain the entanglement of
inhuman matter (including forces, concepts and sensations) with human
life (duration or time in space) by exploring what he calls the special
relationship that the (forceful, conceptual and sensational) images of
cinema have to our contemporary perception of time and of ourselves.
Arguing that since time can never be known in and of itself but only in
relation to an image of something else, Deleuze maintains that, since the
advent of cinema, contemporary culture has become fundamentally audiovisual, a culture in which we understand and represent ourselves in
step with cinematic renditions of time and space. In other words, Deleuze
asserts that the way in which cinema presents the passage of time reflects
culturally contingent strategies for both imagining and imaging ourselves
and our place in the world. For Deleuze, ‘‘cinema does not just present
images, it surrounds them with a world’’ (Deleuze 1989: 68) by presenting
images that are always ‘‘haunted by a past and a future’’ (37), ‘‘a before
and an after as they coexist with the image’’ (38).
In Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997), D. N. Rodowick further argues
that the way in which Deleuze’s books on cinema interrogate filmic
representations of time presents both a profound critique of contemporary
‘‘concepts of identity and subjectivity’’ and a challenge to ‘‘questions of
hierarchy . . . [and the] identity politics’’ such categorical understandings of
the world engender (Rodowick 1997: xiv). ‘‘For Deleuze, cinema . . . brings
philosophy into contact with life’’ (Rodowick 2010a: xvi), offering itself ‘‘as a
medium for an interrogation of ourselves, of our relationship to the world,
and to other beings’’ (Rodowick 2010b: 97). Deleuze’s ethics, observes
Rodowick, are designed to inspire an examination of the ways we live and of
our belief ‘‘in this world and its powers of transformation’’ (99). Deleuze
wants to return to us a faith ‘‘in the body . . . [and] in this world’’ (Deleuze
1989: 173), in their ability to perpetuate life as change and becoming, and
in the ‘‘ever renewable possibility of beginning again’’ that characterises
time (Rodowick 2010b: 112). Rodowick, thus, sees Deleuze’s books as an
exploration of the ‘‘philosophical relation between image and thought’’
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(Rodowick 1997: xvi) in ‘‘service to life* the affirmation of life as the creation
of the new*and to resisting those forces that inhibit in life the appearance
of the new, the unforeseen, and the unexpected’’ (xvii).
In The Matrix of Visual Culture (2003), Patricia Pisters expands
Rodowick’s examination of the connections between Deleuze’s film
theories and his philosophy of time to explore the relevance of his
work to interpretations of contemporary popular cinema. Starting with
Deleuze’s argument that we now live in a metacinematic universe, Pisters
investigates how this kind of universe challenges ‘‘the borders of selfhood
(or subjectivity) . . . in time’’ (Pisters 2003: 20). By first defining a
metacinematic universe, or what Deleuze calls ‘‘the universe as cinema
in itself’’ (Deleuze 1986: 59), as one in which our experience of time is
altered by our constant exposure to images that are stored on film, to new
images that are continually generated by film, and to the way that both
these stored and new images mutually influence one another, Pisters then
argues that such a universe liberates us from the sequential view of time
that tends to fix identity and constrain the becoming that is life. In this
metacinematic universe, she continues, we have come to understand our
own past, present and future through a ‘‘camera consciousness,’’ or a kind
of perception akin to the ability of a camera to freely move or change
viewpoints not only in space but also in time (Pisters 2003: 2). This camera
consciousness allows us to go beyond movement and description and to
enter a realm where ‘‘the whole image has to be ‘read’, no less than seen’’
(Deleuze 1989: 22). In this realm, we have to take into account not only the
space pictured but the ‘‘internal elements and relations’’ (22) of an object as
well as ‘‘the mental connections it is able to enter into’’ (23) or inspire us to
create. By enabling us to jump between non-chronological layers of time,
this camera consciousness changes our understanding of the present so
that it no longer relies only on bodily and cognitive experiences or
traditional interpretations of time, but on the never-ending stream of nonsequential, non-linear, and often remixed or reorganised images to which
we are continually exposed as well.
According to Deleuze, in a metacinematic universe structured by camera
consciousness, this stream of images does not represent the world, but
literally shapes us and the world around us (my italics). ‘‘Instead of
representing an already deciphered real,’’ this stream of images aims
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The magic of cinema
‘‘at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered real’’ (Deleuze 1989: 1). Existing
concurrently on what Deleuze describes as a ‘‘plane of immanence,’’ or
‘‘an infinite set of all images’’ where ‘‘each image exists in itself’’ (Deleuze
1986: 59) and where the identity of each is defined by the constant movement between images that prevents them from being closed, both filmic and
real-life images of the past and the future, or what Deleuze calls virtual
images, and those of the present, or what he terms actual images, are equally
real. ‘‘In fact,’’ says Deleuze, ‘‘there is no virtual which does not become
actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same
reaction’’ (Deleuze 1989: 69). Being reversible, Deleuze continues, the actual
and the virtual, the real and the imaginary, the present and the past,
represent two facets of a ‘‘crystal image’’ whose sides, though distinct, are
indiscernible due to the ability of ‘‘each side [to take] the other’s role’’ (69).
Since all virtual and actual images are readily accessible to us through our
camera consciousness, we are able to rearrange them, interact and play with
them, and use them to construct a life (Pisters 2003).
When we look at Strangers in Good Company through the lens of
Deleuze’s concept of the equality and reversibility of virtual and actual
images, the women in this film are not representing themselves through one
kind of image when on screen and being themselves with another kind of
image when off screen, but are becoming, creating themselves anew in the
crystallisation that takes place between the two. According to Deleuze,
due to the way in which the present ‘‘actual image and its contemporaneous past [or] . . . virtual image’’ always show the two aspects of every
moment of our lives (Deleuze 1989: 79), cinema and the images it produces
are never a reflection of a real-life world set apart from and prior to its
representation, but are an integral part of the very construction of the
world and its subjects.
An Indirect Image of Time
Deleuze’s ideas about the simultaneous existence of virtual and actual
images and the creation of the new through their constant interpenetration
and crystallisation presents a challenge to traditional film theory and
its reliance on the concept of film as a representation of ‘‘a supposedly
pre-existing reality’’ (Deleuze 1989: 126). When film is thus seen as a
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representation of reality, difference can be signified only in relation to
an already existing identity by making a comparison through the ‘‘laws of
association, continuity, resemblance, contrast, or opposition’’ (276), like
the comparison the women make between themselves and the young
film crew. Since comparison generally expresses identity in binary form,
such as young/old, male/female or good/evil, representationalism is
a restrictive image of thought that negates both pure difference, or
differences in themselves, and the concept of becoming, or constant
growth and change, in order to maintain a stable concept of the world, the
subject and the image. Representationalism is therefore based on a
Newtonian, static or spatialised universe in which the ‘‘I’’ who judges
difference in relation to identity is transcendent, before and beyond
perception and experience, and ontologically separate from the object it
judges. It is also Cartesian, a ‘‘consequence of the Cartesian division
between ‘internal’ and ‘external’’’ (Barad 2007: 48), mind and body, that
presumes our representations are more accessible to us than the objects
they represent, and Lacanian in the assumption that subjects both on and
off screen are motivated to construct their subjectivity through a desire for
identification with an other who possesses what they lack rather than
through becoming other (Pisters 2003).
In The Movement Image, Deleuze argues that representational thinking
informs the way the greater part of cinema has been produced and viewed
from its inception up through World War II. Projecting the largely
deterministic universe that mainstream culture espoused at that time,
cinematic events structured by representational thinking are linked by
a chronology in which the past leads inevitably to the present and the
future emerges predictably out of the present. When time is subordinated
to movement, no matter how disordered the events, time remains
‘‘a consequence of action . . . dependent on movement . . . inferred from
space [and] . . . in principle a chronological time’’ (Deleuze 1989: 128).
Whenever cinema halts time in this way, then reconstitutes it as linear and
successive by extracting and stringing together segments of motion in a
representative fashion, the result is what Deleuze calls an indirect image
of time. Such an indirect image, argues Deleuze, recomposes movement
as a mechanical succession of instants which causes one to miss ‘‘the
movement because one constructs a Whole [in which] one assumes that
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‘all is given’, whilst movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor
giveable . . .. As soon as the whole is given . . . time is no more . . . [and]
there is no longer room for real movement’’ (Deleuze 1986: 7). Movementimage cinema thus imposes an order on life in which truth is unchanging,
identity is pre-existing, the whole is always the sum of its parts, and
movement is linked by rational, predictable and successive intervals.
Looking at Strangers in Good Company in terms of a representation
in which action is the master of time, the passage of time, rather than
offering the possibility of the new, is spatialised in ‘‘frozen . . . poses,
aligned on a linear and irreversible continuum’’ (Rodowick 1997: 21). Time
is envisioned as a straight line on which events occur, placing events
in time (or on time) rather than seeing events as constituting time.
This representational or indirect image of time as linear, abstract and
predictable underlies fixed constructions such as the stages of life and
inflexible narratives such as ageing as decline, deterioration and lack.
It also provides a continual stream of static and pervasively negative
images of who and what the old are, images to which the old have ready
access through their camera consciousness, that can increase anxiety,
contribute to incapacity, and lead to social inertia, a situation in which the
perception of having access to a steadily decreasing amount of linear time
is felt as social pressure and results in an inability to entertain new ideas or
to struggle against perceived limits (Brennan 1999).1
We can see the effects of this indirect image of time on the construction
of old age in Strangers in Good Company in the scenes that stress the
physical limitations that the women’s medical conditions impose on them,
such as when they pass a cup of water around so that they can take
medications for high blood pressure, water retention, heart trouble, and
the aches and pains of arthritis, or when the women agree that Catherine,
despite her arthritic feet, is the only one who has any chance of walking
1
In ‘‘Social Physics: Inertia, Energy, and Aging,’’ Teresa Brennan argues that the
effects of social pressure to conform appear as physical differences in the way we
age. Since life is about change and becoming different, the constant demand to
conform to age-related norms can bring us closer to death by impeding our ability
to take on fresh ideas and grow. Similar to Deleuze, Brennan sees the power of
images to be real material forces in the way we construct our lives.
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out for help. Rather than encourage confidence in their ability to act,
innovate and survive, these scenes create fear for their safety, a concern
reflected in Cissy’s terror of becoming destitute and unwanted as she
grows older, and in the dread Constance expresses at the thought of dying
in a hospital or a nursing home. Representational images like these also
naturalise problems and fears that are rooted in the cultural and the social,
and impose chronological limits (what Meigs described as known limits)
on character and spectator alike, crushing the creative nature of existence
under a medicalised view of ageing that is built on conformity to the image
of the same and on the inherent predictability of life.
The reality of social pressure as a debilitating force and its connection to
movement-image cinema is particularly well illustrated in the scene in
which Michelle, the young bus driver who has sprained her ankle and thus
is even more incapacitated than the older women, encourages 80-year-old
Beth to take off her wig and give herself a chance to look ‘‘natural.’’ When
Beth refuses, admitting that she’s afraid to look like an old lady with a
wrinkled neck and thinning hair, and comments that she does not have
much time left anyway, implying that it is not worth the effort to change
now in any case, the consequences of imagining and imaging ourselves in
a world ruled by Newton’s static and linear universe, Descartes’ splitting
of mind from body, and Lacan’s construction of desire as lack congeal.
For Beth to reimagine herself now would force her up against the ‘‘truth’’
of old age and the forms of subjectification that command ‘‘you will be
One’’ and that One will be marked, ‘‘once and for all, with a known and
recognizable identity’’ (Rodowick 1997: 201). Representational thinking
boldly declares Beth to be an old lady only disguised as a film star,
a judgement with which she herself may concur through internalisation
of the decline narrative, even though film star and old lady are obviously
the same.
Thus, to view Strangers in Good Company in the tradition of movementimage cinema with its indirect conception of time as linear, orderly,
knowable, and predictable spatialised makes it difficult to move
beyond the negative and disparaging representations of old age that
emphasise limits and make derogatory pronouncements about what those
within the category can accomplish. It leads both viewer and character to
interpret the meaning of a movie in a way that is particularly detrimental
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to the construction of old age and leaves both spectator and actor with a
store of negative images on which to draw as they, themselves, grow older.
Since this perspective is unlikely to be the source of the empowering magic
to which Meigs so often refers, rather than succumb to this anaesthetising
image, we need to look at the movie from another point of view.
A Direct Image of Time
Deleuze accomplishes this perspectival shift when, instead of thinking in
terms of representations, he proposes a more open, immanent way of
thinking he calls rhizomatics. Rhizomatic thinking leaves behind the
transcendental, static ‘‘I’’ and its binary judgements and opens up the
concept of life as perpetual becoming. Contrary to representationalism,
knowing, in the immanent tradition, ‘‘does not come from standing at a
distance and representing the world but rather from a direct material
engagement with the world’’ (Barad 2007: 49), a world of which we are a part
and an engagement with it that involves mind and body as a whole.
Deleuze’s rhizomatic thinking, like Karen Barad’s later theory of agential
realism that theorises the natural and the social or the material and the
intelligible together, characterises matter and meaning, time and space, as
neither determinate nor unchanging, but as mutually constituted through
dynamic and on-going intra-actions in which individuals, whether objects
or living beings, emerge through specific discursive and material practices.
Identity is, therefore, neither essential and pre-existing nor constituted
through comparison with another, but is in ‘‘constant formation, always
changing through multiple encounters’’ with the world and with others,
and always open to the emergence of ‘‘unexpected possibilities’’ (Pisters
2003: 22). Signification is not a discovery but a process in which ‘‘each era
thinks itself by producing its particular image of thought’’ (Rodowick
1997: 7). Desire is not based on a fundamental lack of original wholeness,
as Lacan argued, but on what Spinoza characterised as a wish to live and
preserve our lives by making connections with people and things that will
affirm our power to act and give us joy (Pisters 2003).
In The Time Image, Deleuze argues that since World War II and ‘‘the rise
of situations to which one can no longer react, of environments with which
there are now only chance relations’’ (Deleuze 1989: 272), the immanent
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tradition has begun to replace representationalism in cinema so that
movement, rather than constructing time, has become subordinated to
time. In this reversal, where ‘‘time is no longer the measure of movement
but movement is the perspective of time’’ (22), time-image film, instead of
projecting a deterministic universe, reflects a culture influenced by ideas
such as deconstruction, chaos theory and quantum physics, and it presents
a more probabilistic world. With what Deleuze calls a direct image of time,
the temporal relationship between events is nonlinear and undecidable
beforehand and the future remains open rather than being determined by
the present and the past. This situation allows ‘‘the connecting of parts . . .
to take place in many ways’’ (129), so that identity is no longer based on
being but on a becoming that is constantly changing due to the thinking
and the action that time and change provoke (Grosz 2005). And rather than
subscribe to a notion of truth that is based on repetition as the eternal
return of the same and that ‘‘poses change and differentiation as
deception’’ (Rodowick 1997: 137), the direct image of time ‘‘puts the
notion of truth into crisis’’ (Deleuze 1989: 130) by picturing repetition as
‘‘recurrence and differentiation’’ (Rodowick 1997: 137). Since life is
temporal and durational, ‘‘which means that within it, there can never
be any real repetition but only continual invention insofar as the living
carry the past along with the present’’ (Grosz 2011: 31), recurrence refers to
the return that affirms the on-going existence of a being and differentiation
to the process of that being becoming other through time. Direct timeimage cinema, thus, shows that truth ‘‘has to be created, [that] there is no
other truth than the creation of the New’’ (Deleuze 1989: 146 7), and
presents images that are expressive of the creative possibilities of life rather
than representative of an abstract, ideal life.
When we look at movies in terms of immanent or rhizomatic thinking,
time is no longer subordinated to movement but is an element in itself.
With no straight line to constrain it, time becomes series of ‘‘irrational
intervals that produce a dissociation rather than an association of images’’
(Rodowick 1997: 143), and that stress the differentiation that is the essence
of all that exists. Direct time-image film does not link action and reaction
by producing ‘‘an uninterrupted chain of images each one slave of the next’’
(Deleuze 1989: 190), but creates a sequence of images ‘‘whose aberrant
movements unveil the force of time as change’’ (Rodowick 1997: 136).
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This concept of time positions truth as temporal rather than fixed,
freeing both protagonist and viewer to create something new. Thus,
direct time-image cinema may help empower the old to push beyond the
limits imposed on them by negative discourses and narratives, and to reject
the judgement that construes old age as an ending when the world,
as Deleuze characterises it, is always and ever only a ‘‘becoming . . . [a]
potentialization . . . [a] power of the false’’ that brings ‘‘every model of the
true into question’’ (Deleuze 1989: 275).
In Strangers in Good Company, if we conceive of the situation in which the
stranded women find themselves as an example of the way in which time
can force change by generating problems for them to solve that will ensure
‘‘that they . . . transform themselves’’ (Grosz 2005: 49), then Catherine’s
attempts to fix the bus engine with an emery board, Alice’s conversion of a
pair of pantyhose into a fish net, the making of a herbal poultice for
Michelle’s injured ankle and even Constance’s decision to throw away her
pills take on new meaning. Understood in the context of direct time-image
cinema, this repair, these inventions, and this decision become creative acts
that bring memory (virtual images) to bear on perception (actual images)
in a way that reveals the complicity of mind and matter, virtual and actual.
Catherine, Alice and Constance all search out virtual memories in order to
make their actual perception of the situation or problem meaningful.
In this process, present perception, affecting the actual body in space,
combines with memory, stored virtually in nonchronological layers of past
in the mind, to bring ‘‘ever more complex and numerous points in time
into relation with each other’’ (Rodowick 1997: 88). Each time a virtual
image is called up in order to relate to an actual perception, an object,
concept or idea, is ‘‘de-formed and created anew, widening and deepening
the mental picture it inspires’’ (90), making ‘‘time and thought perceptible
. . . [and] visible’’ (Deleuze 1989: 18).
For example, when the series of images of the women’s younger selves
flash across the screen or when they share parts of their life stories with one
another, they are not just making present connections, but are changing
themselves through the act of revising both past and present in their
becoming. One evening in the old farmhouse, when Mary is writing before
sleep, she comments on how quiet it is and mentions how silence can
sometimes be frightening. Cissy responds by telling how the night-time
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silence was burst by the sounds the bombs made while she was in an
underground shelter in England during World War II. As they listen to each
other’s stories, their present perception of quiet searches out virtual
memories in order to make the actual perception of quiet more meaningful,
and the notion of what constitutes quiet evolves for both of them. The object
quiet ‘‘does not extend into movement, but enters into relation with a
‘recollection-image’ that it calls up’’ (Deleuze 1989: 46), bringing up different
images, ‘‘creating anew not only the object perceived, but also the everwidening systems with which it may be bound up . . . [in] a higher
expansion of memory . . . [and] deeper strata of reality’’ (Bergson qtd. in
Deleuze 1989: 46). Thus, body and perception, brain and memory,
interpenetrate to fuse matter and meaning, substance and significance,
present and past into something unexpected and new (Pisters 2003; Barad
2007).
This interpenetration leads Deleuze to assert that there is no difference
between matter and image, object and perception; ‘‘the thing and the
perception of the thing are one and the same’’ (Deleuze 1986: 63). They are
identical not because the object or concept somehow preexists the
perception of it, but because perception creates the object by taking from
the whole only what interests it or what serves its needs (Rodowick 1997);
‘‘we perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function
of our needs’’ (Deleuze 1986: 63). As Barad explains, objects are not
already there (Barad 2007); they are formed by ‘‘contingent and partial
picturings of matter . . . samplings of a continuous flow’’ of everything
that exists on the plane of immanence (Rodowick 1997: 35). For Deleuze,
the continual reorganisation of actual and virtual images, whether from a
movie or from ‘‘real-life,’’ around ‘‘a central nucleus of bodily interest and
activity’’ is what life is (Grosz 2005: 98). And human consciousness of life,
according to Deleuze, comes about during the gap between perception
as interest and reaction as activity, an interval that gives the body ‘‘time
to select . . . elements, to organize them or to integrate them into a new
movement which is impossible to conclude by simply prolonging the
received’’ perception (Deleuze 1986: 62). The time that passes before
choosing how to combine remembered (virtual) information with perception (actual) information allows the ‘‘past which is preserved and retains
the seeds of life’’ to influence the ‘‘present that passes and goes to death’’
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The magic of cinema
enabling us to begin again with ‘‘the bursting forth of life’’ (Deleuze 1989:
92) that creates a new reality.
The new beginning or reality created by life bursting forth is well
illustrated by the way Constance, the oldest and most frail of the seven,
is often depicted in Strangers in Good Company. Whether on the porch of the
house where they are staying, walking slowly and gingerly down to the
lake, or sitting as if she were a still life on the white-railed porch of her old
summer home, she is time and again isolated by a fixed shot. Apart from
the others, lost in thought, she is detached from the ‘‘horizontal succession
of presents which pass’’ (Deleuze 1989: 91) and which characterise indirect
images of time, and is instead immersed in the vertical system of
correspondence that unites ‘‘every present . . . at a deep level with its
own past, as well as to the past of other . . . presents’’ and makes them
contemporaneous (91). Due to her stillness and isolation, our perception of
Constance’s image is no longer linked to action, to movement in the world,
but to virtual movement in time and to the new and uncertain relations
that she may make there. When her character, rather than act through
movement, is swallowed up in layers of the past where ‘‘the child . . . is
contemporary with the adult, the old [woman] and the adolescent’’ (92),
we can see how her memories of being a young girl at the lake, or of the
birdsong she can no longer hear, or of her earlier life in the photos we see
projected on the screen, though virtual images, are just as real and just as
influential to her state of mind and to her future actions as are the actual
images of her present condition. In these scenes, for Constance, as for
Deleuze, life and consciousness of life are not special substances different
in nature from matter; they are the result of the amalgamation of mind and
matter. And the primary function of the brain is not to be a repository of
ideas, freedom, and creativity, but to insert a delay between the stimuli
produced by all the actual and virtual images to which the brain has access
through our camera consciousness and our reaction to them, granting us
freedom from predetermination and making an open future inevitable.
Elaborating on Deleuze’s ideas, philosopher Alva Noe in Out of Our Heads
(2009) argues that the brain is not an information-processing organ that
constructs a mental representation of the world, but it is more like a traffic
cop whose job is to coordinate our bodily dealings with the environment
and the others within it. ‘‘It is thus only in the context of . . . embodied
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International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
existence, situated in an environment, dynamically interacting with objects
and situations, that the function of the brain can be understood’’ (Noe 2009:
65). Perceptual consciousness is not in our heads, but is a learned relationship to and a skillful integration with both objects and the environment,
shaped and structured by our body’s ability to adjust our relation to the
world around us.2 We are not world representers, but are ‘‘dynamically
spread-out world-involving beings’’ (82) in whom matter and life entwine
by dynamising the forces of matter in order to suffuse the actual material
present with the virtuality of the past (Grosz 2011). It is this entwining of life
and matter, enabled by the delay or hesitation in which we have freedom
of choice, argues Deleuze, that constitutes time itself, the generation of the
future through the reactivation of the virtuality of the past in the actuality of
the present (Grosz 2005).
The Magic of Time
Time, looked at in this way, is neither a succession of equally metered
moments nor a uniform background against which movement or stillness
can be measured. It is neither linear nor absolute. It is non-chronological in
that it can be found in ‘‘the pre-existence of a past in general’’ as ‘‘sheets’’
of time that appear to succeed each other only ‘‘from the point of view of
former presents’’ (Deleuze 1989: 99). It does not leave a mark and then
march on, but is produced through the uneven and often discontinuous
enfolding of historical practices and agencies in the sedimented mattering
of the world. Matter, including our bodies, carries within it the evidence of
the intra-active practices through which it is produced thus giving time
a history which can be read in the differential and on-going becoming of
the world (Barad 2007). Contrary to what many of the discourses and
2
Alva Noe argues that the idea that the brain is the thing inside of us that makes
us conscious is not a new idea exemplified by brain scans but a simple substitution
of a physical object, the brain, for the nonphysical stuff inside of us, our essence,
that Descartes believed gave us consciousness. According to Noe, consciousness
is neither located inside of us nor fundamentally neural, but is a work of
improvisational relationships achieved in the processes of living in and with
and in response to our environment, including the human and nonhuman others
within it.
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The magic of cinema
narratives surrounding ageing would have us believe, time is neither a
cage that imprisons us nor a finite quantity of linear moments that will run
out more or less on schedule. It is not only something within which we
exist, but is constituted by the very fact of our existence.
Time, as understood by Deleuze, does not trap us but is more like a kind
of magic that can free us to live, continually opening up possibilities for
becoming by giving us chance after chance to combine our past with our
present in all sorts of new and unexpected ways. ‘‘It is we who are internal
to time, not the other way round’’ writes Deleuze, and it is time ‘‘in which
we move, live, and change’’ (Deleuze 1989: 82). Time and the virtual world
to which it gives us access, says Deleuze, is our subjectivity, the place
where we go to look for the pasts that will influence our present and equip
us to construct a new future. And cinema, ‘‘because it gives material form
to varieties of . . . time, and change’’ (Rodowick 1997: 140) by providing
us with images of other ways of being and becoming, can aid in the
actualisation of these virtual possibilities. When Meigs writes that the
magic they feel during and after filming allows them to push beyond their
limits in a nonjudgemental atmosphere that gives old women room to
exist; when she says that they benefit from conditions on a set that ‘‘denies
the passing of clock-time’’ (Meigs 1991: 77); when she describes the ‘‘lining
up of self- and film images’’ (78) that forces them to let go of all their
preconceived ideas about who they are and how they look, she is referring
to the experience of becoming that a direct image of time can bestow.
Unlike indirect time or movement-image cinema, where the body is
always acting, reacting and gaining its perspective in a world organised
by the totality of Newtonian predictability and Cartesian separation,
direct time-image cinema returns to us an undecidable body for which
‘‘becoming-other in thought is the prelude to becoming other’’ (Rodowick
1997: 168). It replaces a cinema of action with a cinema of seeing that
brings the ‘‘senses into direct relation with time and thought’’ in order to
make them perceptible (Deleuze 1989: 17). Direct time-image cinema,
therefore, points us to another world, a science-fiction-like world that
can, as Deleuze says, ‘‘affirm life and its untimely forces of creation’’
(Rodowick 1997: xviii). When Meigs writes that the film is still ‘‘living in
us’’ (Meigs 1991: 169), her words demonstrate an innate understanding
of the porosity of representation and reality that Deleuze is talking about.
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International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
She comprehends that filmic and real-life images together conspire to
unlock the life hidden away in old women (Meigs 1991), to allow them to
move beyond static representations of old age into the freedom of an open
future of becoming.
‘‘Nothing happens,’’ says Winnie. ‘‘We are what happens. The film is
about seven . . . old women . . . happening,’’ answers Mary (Meigs 1991:
78). And Mary is right. As Mary correctly perceives, and as Deleuze
argues, direct time-image cinema can take the most banal situation and, by
‘‘extending the force of contemplation . . . across daily life’’ (Deleuze 1989:
19), can produce ‘‘knowledge and action out of pure vision’’ (18). In such a
situation, ‘‘the character has become a kind of viewer’’ (3), a non-actor
‘‘capable of seeing and showing rather than acting . . . or following a
dialogue’’ (20), someone who belongs ‘‘to the real and yet play[s] a role’’
that makes ‘‘life in its entirety . . . spectacle’’ (834). Thus, these seven
women, and the way in which they combine the unfolding story of their
lives with the unrolling narrative of the film, embody exactly the new type
of actor that direct time-image cinema requires and that can succeed in
bringing philosophy and cinema together in the creation of life.
Near the beginning of the movie, when the women find a strange object
whose use is unknown to most of them only to discover that it’s a boot jack
in the form of a voluptuous woman, what one of them laughingly calls
19th-century pornography, our view of them as old women may begin to
change. And when they later talk of the times they were in love, of that
feeling of walking on air, of being in heaven, a feeling that they would
gladly experience all over again if given the chance, we add to their
character the dimension of still desirous and sexual beings. Later, when
Alice, after confessing that she ended up hating the man she married,
admits that she still has hopes, dreams, and feelings, that she is still alive
and would welcome the right man if he came along, we can tell from her
body and her face that, when Deleuze says that ‘‘people . . . occupy a place
in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space’’
(Deleuze 1989: 89), it is true. As Alice speaks of love, we begin to
understand how the body, as a container of time, can force thought into
various ‘‘categories of life’’ in order to ‘‘relate thought to time’’ (189) in the
interest of life, hope, and the creation of the new. And when we grasp that
‘‘memory is not in us; it is we who move in . . . memory’’ (98), then we can
58
The magic of cinema
start to recognise that cinema possesses the ability to form an alliance with
the depths of time in order to reveal not just what happens to the image
but ‘‘around the image, behind the image and even inside the image’’
(125). Thus, in the brain as on the screen, movements become expressive
rather than representative, ‘‘feelings become characters’’ (124), and both
are freed to show the interactions among the past, present and future,
between the inside and the outside, that take place in all of us whenever
we imagine differently the story of our lives.
When looked at in this way, as time-image cinema where ‘‘the image
no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics, but
topology and time’’ (Deleuze 1989: 125), Strangers in Good Company is
ultimately ‘‘a film about life’’ (Meigs 1991: 86), about the resistance of life
to the forces that would exhaust and deplete it, forces that often render the
lives of the old not worth living. As these seven old women laugh, dance,
sing, dream of new love, and splash in the lake together, as they share their
food and chores, their worries and fears, their hopes and dreams with each
other, as they accept and celebrate their differences as Englishwomen,
black, Mohawk, Roman Catholic nun, lesbian, and French Canadian, and
become bound to each other both in the film and in life, they embody the
power of the direct image of time to invent a new reality and to create joy.
They demonstrate that old age, with its vast store of memories (or virtual
images), often used to characterise the old as behind the times and
unchanging, and with its physical and cognitive limitations and disabilities (or actual conditions that provoke change), often drawn on to
represent the old as slow and unimaginative, are in reality precisely the
circumstances that can make the old even more creative in their ability to
combine the virtual and the actual in order to survive and grow.
After the movie became a success,3 Meigs writes that Beth, then aged 82,
who during filming was afraid to remove her wig and show her wrinkles,
was ‘‘reborn,’’ finally ‘‘become the actress of her dream’’ (Meigs 1991: 167).
3
Strangers in Good Company not only won critical acclaim but also won the 1991
Genie Award for best editing. In addition, Alice Diablo and Cissy Meddings were
nominated for the 1991 Genie Award for Best Actress, Winifred Holden and
Catherine Roche were nominated for the 1991 Genie Award for Best Supporting
Actress, and the movie was nominated for the 1991 Genie Award for Best Picture.
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International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
Flying to New York and London, appearing on TV, seemingly ageless and
inexhaustible with all disguises and preconceived notions of who she was
gone, Beth became a shining example of the creative possibilities of life
provided by the crystallisation of filmic and real-life images. By refusing to
differentiate between representation and reality, and by daring to combine
the virtual with the actual in a new and unpredictable way, out of the
swirling mists of a conventional and predictable old age, Beth made film
star and old woman truly one. And, in the process proved that magic, as a
becoming through time, really does happen.
Conclusion
Films such as Strangers in Good Company that present life as becoming
implicitly ally themselves with emerging critical theories of ageing such as
critical and social gerontology that seek emancipation from ‘‘normative
assumptions about ageing, particularly as they are imposed by various
agents of social control’’ (Graham 2010: 177). The stories these movies
tell and the characters they create, therefore, present a challenge to the
myriad ways in which contemporary ageism is made manifest. They
make us think about ageism as not only oppression the systemic, often
unintentional, constraints imposed by institutional, bureaucratic, and
collective assumptions and reactions to people within a certain category
resulting in the inability of those within that category to develop and
express themselves fully and domination the institutional conditions
that inhibit those within that category from fully determining their actions
or the conditions of their actions but as interference with the differential
becoming of the world itself (Barad 2007; Young 1990).
Strangers in Good Company also lets us see how older people exceed the
limitations imposed on them by their categorical affiliation, and even their
own internalised ageism, in order to remain an integral part of the
becoming of the world how life exceeds the model (Kirby 2011). When
the women call on a lifetime of virtualities in order to improvise and
survive in the actual present, and when they create a sense of community
marked by kindness, respect, and time for really listening to each other’s
stories despite the exigencies of survival, in the process, they give both
themselves and the viewer an opportunity to see time as a creative force
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The magic of cinema
that inspires becoming rather than the ominous ticking of a universal
mechanical clock. Similar to Mary, an artist both in real life and in the
movie, who admits that the real art of her pictures lies in knowing what to
omit, what to leave to the imagination, this film challenges us to imagine
cinema not as a way to present a perfect illusion or a representation of
the real, but as an exercise in inventing new realities, an opportunity to
confront the virtual other of pure time, that is both outside us as sheer
force or non-human potential and inside us where we live and think, in
order to ‘‘pitch us into becoming’’ (Rodowick 1997: 210).
Finally, Strangers in Good Company may help us understand how the
way we conceptualise and measure time affects the way we constitute
and ‘‘practice’’ ageing and old age. Taking a cue from the quantum
phenomenon of decoherence, which posits that when a quantum system
such as a single atom, existing in a superposition, or being in two or more
places or states at the same time, is ‘‘caught’’ and separated from its
entanglement with the world by a macroscopic object through an act of
measurement or a cut, it decoheres, meaning its wave-function collapses
and it becomes a distinct particle in a particular location (Al-Khalili 2004),
we might think of becoming in somewhat the same way. Although this is
certainly not an accurate analogy, if life can be seen as somewhat like a
superposition in that it is neither linear nor fixed but full of possibilities,
then decoherence suggests that finding ourselves ‘‘caught’’ in a culture in
which old age and old bodies are persistently and deliberately measured,
described, and devalued can, in some sense, cut the elderly off from the
continuum of life, eroding their ability to continue becoming in a way that
can even hasten death.4 Yet, just as a wave-function that has collapsed into
a determinate particle does not cease to be a part of the ‘‘mattering’’ of the
world, in another sense, death may be simply another step in the process
of becoming that is our entanglement in the world.
When Deleuze argued ‘‘ that the virtual worlds created by screen forms
intervene in all aspects of things in the worlds on screen and the bodies in
the worlds external to that screen,’’ producing ‘‘new concepts that change
4
A 2002 study conducted by Dr. Becca Levy, a professor at the Yale School of Public
Health, found that those who viewed ageing as a positive experience lived an
average of 7.5 years longer than those who viewed ageing in a negative way.
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International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
how we perceive and interact with the world’’ (Colman 2011: 1), he
wanted us to understand that the concepts that cinema gives rise to are
‘‘not ‘about’ cinema, but about . . . a new practice of images and signs,
whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice’’ (Deleuze
1989: 280). To the extent that watching and analysing Strangers in Good
Company can open our minds to alternative concepts and practices of time
and becoming that encourage us to fully incorporate old age and even
death back into life, then, as Deleuze believed, the ability of cinema to
call forth a new and different reality may truly change the way we
construct and value the last years of our lives. By enabling us to see our
chronological age and our changing bodies as more or other than markers
of decline, the magic of cinema might even help us learn to experience
ageing not only as loss, but as part of the abundant and unpredictable
growth and becoming that is life itself.
Corresponding Author
Pamela H. Gravagne, Department of American Studies and Women Studies
Program, University of New Mexico, 20 Pine Ridge Rd., Sandia Park,
NM 87047, USA. Email: pgravagn@unm.edu
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